How BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti took an instant messaging bot and turned it into a $1.5 billion media empire

Jonah Peretti is the CEO and founder of BuzzFeed, a digital media
company that reaches hundreds of millions of readers around the
world with its fun quizzes and videos, as well as with
hard-hitting news coverage.

Before starting BuzzFeed, Peretti
launched The Huffington Post along with Ariana Huffington, Ken
Lerer and the late conservative firebrand, Andrew
Breitbart.

Jonah's first experience
with viral fame, after an email thread between him and
Nike exploded.

How he first met Arianna Huffington, who invited him to her
home and cooked him breakfast.

What Andrew Breitbart — another Huffington Post founder — was
like, and what he might think of his namesake website today.

Buzzfeed's early days as an instant messaging bot.

The reason he resisted the urge to sell BuzzFeed after
receiving a huge buyout offer from Disney.

Why company executives who seem intregral might not be
as essential as you think.

That famous lewd Ivanka Trump tweet, and why he published
it.

Why Buzzfeed decided to publish the Trump-Russia
dossier.

How to build a successful startup, and turn it into something
massive.

The following transcript has
been edited for clarity and length.

Alyson Shontell:Jonah Peretti is here with us today. He's the
founder and CEO of Buzzfeed which has been valued at more than a
billion dollars. There are rumors it might go public in 2018, and
he previously cofounded the Huffington Post, so the guy clearly
knows what he's doing. We're really happy to have you here with
us today, Jonah. Thanks for coming.

Jonah Peretti:
Thanks for having me.

Shontell:
Awesome. First off, we were just talking about how you're in
California now, but Buzzfeed was founded in New York, so how many
people are here? How many people are there? How big is Buzzfeed
these days?

Peretti: We have
about 700 people in New York and 600 in LA with more video
production in LA and more news people in New York and about 1500
globally, so we have offices in a lot of other cities around the
world.

Shontell: I
wanted to talk about how you grew it to the size that it is, but
first can we go back to growing up in California? You have a
sister who's a comedian. You've always had this knack for making
things go viral. The first thing I remember reading about you is
this famous Nike letter that you wrote that went viral when you
were in college I think?

Peretti: In grad
school.

Shontell: So
what was the story behind that?

How Jonah went viral before social media
existed: The rejection hotline,"Black People Love Us," and
trolling Nike

Buzzfeed CEO Jonah
PerettiREUTERS/Albert
Gea

Peretti: I was
doing what most students do, which is procrastinate. I had to
write my master's thesis. Instead of writing my master's thesis I
was surfing the web, surfing the information superhighway. This
was in January of 2001, so still pretty early days of internet
culture. Nike had just launched something called Nike ID where
you could customize your shoes and you could put your name
underneath the swoosh, so I tried to customize a pair of shoes
with the word sweatshop under the swoosh, and they rejected the
order.

We had this email exchange back
and forth where they said, "It's inappropriate slang." I said,
"No, it's in the dictionary. It means a shop or a factory
worker's toilet under healthy conditions." They wrote back
another excuse and at the end they said, "Look, we just reserve
the right to not put that on the shoe." I said, "Okay, I'll
change the ID, but can you at least send me a picture of the 10
year old Vietnamese girl that stitches the shoes together?" Then
they didn't write back after that.

I looked at this email
correspondence. This was before YouTube, before Facebook, before
people thought of things going viral, but there were these things
called email forwards. I pasted this correspondence into an
email, sent it to a few friends, then they sent it to their
friends, and it became an early email forward that reached
millions of people. Even though I didn't know anything about
sweatshops or labor issues, I ended up on the Today Show debating
the issue with Nike's head of global PR and Katie Couric
moderating.

It opened up my eyes to the
possibility of the fact that media was shifting so that if people
thought something was worth passing on or sharing, you could
reach millions of people even if you don't own a printing press
or a broadcast pipe or the normal ways that you reach mass
audiences.

Shontell:That was your first viral taste, but then you
also did other gimmicks and pranks that went viral. What else did
you do?

Peretti: With my
sister, I did something called the New York City rejection line
which was a phone number where if someone was hitting on you and
wouldn't take no for an answer, you could give them your number
and when they called, they get an automated rejection message
that would say, "The person who gave you this number didn't
actually want to see you again. Press one ..."

Shontell: We
should bring that back. I feel like that would be useful
still.

Peretti: Then we
did a project called “Black People Love Us,” which looked like
the personal website of two super-white people who were so proud
of having black friends that they created a whole website about
it. A lot of various types of projects, then after that did
some political projects and did some projects with Ken Lerer who
I later started Huffington Post with along with Arianna
Huffington and Andrew Breitbart.

Shontell: Talk
about the gang getting together for the founding of the
Huffington Post because you have Andrew Breitbart in there and
then you have Kenny Lerer and then you have Arianna Huffington
and you. How did you all come together to form what ultimately
became a huge company?

Peretti: It was
a lot of serendipity. Kenny heard about some of the viral
projects I had done.

Shontell: Was he
one of the recipients of the prank phone call?

Starting the Huffington Post with Andrew Breitbart,
Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer, and what it was like to work
with BreitbartConservative
activist Andrew Breitbart listens to a question during an event
at the Heritage Foundation April 21, 2011 in Washington,
DC.Getty Images/Brendan
Smialowski

Peretti: I don't
think so. I think he had seen the Nike email and heard about some
of the work we were doing, so he stopped by and wanted to do some
work on gun control which was his issue and he was trying to
understand how to use the internet to do that. We did a few
projects together there. Then at the end of working together on a
few things he said, "I know business. You know the internet.
Let's start a company together." We shook hands, but we didn't
know what we were going to do.

Then subsequently he went to LA
and met Arianna Huffington and was amazed at how many people she
knew and how connected she was to people in the world of
businesses and entertainment and politics, and so many different
worlds who came together in Arianna's own personal network. He
came back from his trip to LA and said, "Our company with
Arianna..."

I was like, "What?" I was
Googling her. It's like,Who is this fancy lady we're in business
with?I said,
"Listen, if I'm going to go into business with someone, I need to
meet her."

So I flew out to LA, and I stayed
at her house in Brentwood and woke up at seven in the morning.
She already had a 6 AM meeting and had breakfast, and she was
incredibly charming. Then I flew back thinking this was an
adventure. We're going to build something. Then Andrew Breitbart
had previously worked for Arianna, and at the time that we
started Huffington Post, he was working for the Drudge Report and
was really this savant of internet news.

Kenny got very excited about the
idea that the guy from the Drudge Report who spent — half the
day, Andrew would write headlines and half the day Matt Drudge
would write headlines. Kenny got very exciting about luring him
to Huffington Post. He joined us before we launched the site and
was one of the partners in the business. Then it just didn't last
very long once the site launched, because the site was too
liberal for him. He thought the site was going to be much more
bipartisan and had trouble writing these liberal headlines and
stuff.

Shontell: He's
unfortunately since passed away, but you did have the chance to
know him. He's of course the founder of Breitbart, which seems to
be one of the Trump administration's favorite publications. What
do you think he would make of what's become of his publication,
and what was he like?

Peretti: He was
just bouncing off the walls at a million miles an hour, tons of
ideas, lived on the internet kind of guy. It was challenging to
work with him but also a lot of fun. He was at some level a real
internet troll. He told me a story about how he was writing a
headline on the Drudge Report about Chris Rock, and how he loves
Chris Rock and thinks he's hilarious, but the headline was like
"Shock and Outrage: How could he host the Oscars when he makes
all these inappropriate jokes?"

He knew that he could write it
exactly in a way that would cause socially-liberal conservatives
to think it was funny and actual more family-values conservatives
to be outraged. He knew how to find the line that would cause all
the different cultural cracks to explode and have people bang
into each other. He loved it. He loved that kind of thing.

I think the continued trolling of
massive parts of the population by Breitbart and the Trump
administration would be something that Andrew would love. I think
he would have a more complex and nuanced view on Trump himself,
and on policies and things like that. It's hard to say have since
he passed away several years ago now what his views on that would
be, but the trolling part he would absolutely love.

Spotting an opportunity to build a giant media
startup

Buzzfeed

Shontell: You
all created Huffington Post. It became — and still — is a giant
success. You did figure out how to merge these viral ideas. You
seemed to have a natural knack for it but then with also tech and
algorithms and data. That was the first time it's really been
done before.

Peretti: I think
when you look at media, you always have to look at what do new
media technologies enable that was not possible before. If you
look at something like cable, CNN could do 24 hour news, which
was not possible before, and the reason you couldn't do 24 hour
news on broadcast is you had prime-time programming and other
shows and soap operas and game shows and all these other things.
You had to cut into that programming to show news. If there's a
big news event like the Iraq war, they couldn't cut into all
their programming because it would destroy their business.

With cable, you could go 24 hours
into a big story, so CNN took advantage of the fact that you
could do things on cable you couldn't do on traditional TV. When
you look at internet media businesses, one of the big things you
get from the internet that you don't get in print and broadcast
is feedback from the audiences and this massive amount of data
that comes in and shows you what are people sharing. What are
people clicking? How are people engaging? When are they dropping
off if you're watching a video? When did they stop scrolling?
What kind of comments are they writing?

It's a massive difference from a
newspaper or broadcast TV. That difference is the key thing that
you need to tap into if you're trying to build something in an
industry. If you're trying to be a new entrant in an industry and
you want to have some prayer of competing against these giant
companies that are already in the industry, like giant
multi-billion dollar companies, The Disney's and NBC's and all
these big companies that already exist in media, how do you
compete with that? You can't, unless you figure out how to tap
into something that is special and new about the new medium that
you're in.

Shontell: You
did that once and then while you're at Huffington Post, you start
what becomes Buzzfeed, right? You did that while doing your job
there?

Peretti: Yeah, I
was doing Huffington Post and BuzzFeed at the same
time.

Shontell: How
did that work?

Peretti: Not
very well. I wouldn't recommend it. I was going between our
office in Chinatown at BuzzFeed and SoHo, and I'd pick up
Vietnamese sandwiches on the way and feed them to the Huff Post
editors. BuzzFeed was more of a lab, and we were
experimenting. It
started to be hard. I was spending most of my time at BuzzFeed
and going Monday mornings to Huff Post for the management meeting
but then spending lots of time thinking about it, emailing a lot
with Paul Barry who was the CTO about product and tech and
growth. It wasn't until Huff Post sold to AOL that I made a
complete break and focused entirely on BuzzFeed. It made a huge
difference in the ability to grow BuzzFeed once I was not also
doing Huff Post.

Shontell: You
described early BuzzFeed as this lab of sorts. What was the first
version? Wasn't it something like an IM product
almost?

Buzzfeed's early days as an Instant Messenger
bot

Peretti:Before we launched anything, we
had something called Buzz Bot that used IM, and we had this thing
that we called a trend detector. Our design advisor was this guy
Jason who was an early pioneer blogger, and he linked to lots of
things. We actually built a crawler that crawled out from his
blog and found a network of 1,000 other blogs, something like
that. Maybe it was 10,000. I can't remember. Then it would look
for acceleration of links among that pool of influential
bloggers.

It was inspired by my friend
Cameron Marlow, who created something called Blogdex, which was a
popular service in the early days of blogging that would track
acceleration of links on blogs. This wasn't public facing. It was
just for our editor Peggy. Peggy Wang was our founding editor.
She still works at the company, and she would look at this trend
detector and see half of it was junk or spam or whatever, and
some of it was interesting.

She would write up little
summaries of that, but before we had a site and before she wrote
the summaries, we had this thing called Buzz Bot and it would
just IM you a link that made it to the top of the trend. The
problem was IM only allowed something like 10 people to be
connected. It was a pretty fun product that only 10 people could
use, so not the best business strategy.

Shontell: Was it
ever hard? It seems like it was almost viral from the start. Was
traction ever difficult, or did you have any tough times in the
early days of BuzzFeed?

Peretti: It's
always hard. It's hard now. It was hard then. Everything is hard.
I think of it as almost like a video game or exercise. If it
wasn't hard, it wouldn't be fun and what's the point? It was
always fun and it's still fun, but you're always trying to solve
problems and new challenges. At BuzzFeed, we've done a good job
in the early years of doubling every year, but it was from very
small numbers.

We’d have 300,000 uniques. Then
one year later, 600,000. None of that was really material, and
none of it could support an ad business. It wasn't until we got
enough scale that that growth put us in a position where people
even noticed, but we were pretty under the radar for a long
time.

Shontell: Now
some media companies are trying to make it cool to be niche and
smaller scale. They're saying, "We just have a small loyal
audience. Who needs all those readers?"

Peretti: That's
what small companies say. That's what we said when we were
small.There was a write up about how smart it was
that Buzzfeed, in a world of information overload where tons of
things are being published, only does five or six things a day.
That focus is so key and is a new trend in media. I remember
reading it and thinking, "Yeah, but we have one editor." Now we
publish hundreds of things a day — video and lists and quizzes
and news and micro-short content and longer shows and
podcasts.

Shontell:
The things
that people like to read online they claim they don't actually
like to read and they want to read lots of other more serious
stuff.I would say the
brand has transitioned quite a bit, but how did you do
that?

Peretti: The way
we did it was an obsession with social, and social to us wasn't a
category or a buzzword. It was, how do you interact with another
person in the world? What I noticed with the Nike email and those
early projects is that people were using content as a way to
connect to other people in their lives, and they were using
content to express their identity or their political beliefs or
their cultural beliefs. They were using content to feel less
alone. In a way, content and communication had converged where
you weren't just consuming content.

You were taking that content and
sharing it with a friend as a way of connecting with another
person in the world. That was really the key for us from the
beginning. When we first started, the way that people were
connecting with each other online was internet memes and humor
and cute animals. Cute animals were an easy way to feel the same
emotion as someone and to say, "Aww," together and you feel
closer to the person. Just the same way when everyone pets the
family dog they feel closer to each other. Not just the dog, but
it's a way of connecting with other people.

Humor is the same thing. When you
laugh with someone, it doesn't really matter what you laugh
about. You just have shared that laughter, and you feel closer to
someone when you've laughed with them. That was what initially
was on Facebook and social platforms and even email
forwards.

Then what we saw was that social
became much bigger, and people started to do that with news. They
started to do it with all kinds of other forms of entertainment,
with video and new formats and new platforms, with Snapchat and
Instagram.

That same human connection, that
same idea of how do people connect with each other, drove all of
our expansion. When people started to share news we said, "Wow,
we'd love to be in the news industry. We'd love to make news." We
didn't think we could because people weren't sharing news. All of
a sudden, we started to see news on Facebook and Twitter, and it
made us realize we could go into that business. We've evolved
along with the way consumers have evolved and the way social
interactions have evolved online.

Shontell: It
seemed like you guys were the first to capitalize on Facebook in
a really meaningful way and there was this idea that maybe people
don't want to come to your website to read stuff. Maybe they want
to read it on Facebook and that's okay. What was your thought
process around seeing the trend of everything going to
distributed?

Buzzfeed
employees work at the company's headquarters in New
YorkThomson
Reuters

Peretti: I think
we figured this out through Ze Frank. We acquired his company
when it was a four person company. He was doing video in LA and
everyone else was in New York. He tried initially to put video on
BuzzFeed's site, and it didn't do nearly as well as when he put
it on YouTube. We started to see our video business really
grow.

It wasn't growing on our site,
but because we were focused on branded content and native
advertising, we could take all of our learnings and still make
money. That was another piece of it. Then looking around at the
industry, we started to realize all these publishers [generated
revenue] based on banner advertisements.

Banner advertisements don't
really scale well to mobile devices. Not scale in the growth
sense, but when you scale them down to a mobile screen, they
don't really work that well. Also, banner ads require getting
people to a site where you can run the banner. Because we weren't
doing banner advertising and because we had already seen with
video how distributed media could work both as a business and for
a consumer, we said, “Wait, why would we fight against the
consumer desire to consume media in these apps? Why don't we lean
into it instead and monetize it with branded content and native
advertising? And instead of having all these links that are
telling you to go somewhere else, just put the content there.
Turn the link into content, and then instead of having to and go
find it somewhere else, you could consume it right away, and it's
cut out a step.”

We went from having billions of
impressions of our links on these social platforms to having
billions of content views on the social platforms because you
could just consume it right there.

Shontell: One
thing that happened as a result of all this success is that you
had outside parties interested in Buzzfeed and potentially
acquiring Buzzfeed. One tough decision that you have to make as a
CEO is, do you stay the course or do you exit? It's been well
reported now that Disney was very interested in buying BuzzFeed a
couple years ago. In the final hour, you decided not to sell.
What was that process like as CEO? How do you walk away from all
of that money that's right there, dangling like a carrot?

Peretti: Some of
these things come down to almost an emotional feeling, but I
think that the gut feeling and emotional feeling actually is
informed by a lot of data and looking at things in a rational
way. The biggest thing for me is that I felt we had many more
things to do as a company, that we valued our independence a
lot.

It felt that we would be able to
do a lot more as an independent company. If you think about the
time when we had some conversations with Disney, we were just
hiring Mark Schoofs to lead our investigate journalism team. That
was just starting. Video we had been doing for a little bit but
it was growing and we knew that it was going to be huge.

Now it's more than half our
revenue. We knew it was going to be huge, but at the time people
thought BuzzFeed was just a website. It felt like there were a
lot of shifts coming, and there would be a lot of opportunity.
There were a lot of things we wanted to do, and remaining an
independent company just in my gut and my bones felt like the
right path.

Shontell: Since
then, the media industry has changed a lot. Do you ever think,
"If I had just sold to Disney, I wouldn't have to figure out this
video thing. I wouldn't have to do all these things in the
industry that are changing so much"?

Don't even think about joining a startup if you don't
like things that are hard

Peretti: I think
you shouldn't be a CEO or even a startup executive or employee if
you don't like things that are hard or challenging, and you don't
like trying to do things that are difficult where you have to
figure out new things that don't exist yet. That has to be part
of why you do it. It has to be part of the fun. They say when
there's a bubble or lots of money flows into startups, you have a
lot of people who come in because they want to make a lot of
money.

The whole get rich quick thing.
"I want to do something where it doesn't take that much work, and
I'll make a lot of money." I'm reading stories about startups and
all the money in startups. It's just a lot harder than it looks.
Harder meaning the day to day is trying to create something new
and trying to be a small little guy in a giant industry.

Even now, we're 1,500 employees
and growing quickly and things are going incredibly well. But
when you compare that to the size of Disney or Time Warner, we're
small. When you want to work in a startup and build something,
it's going to be really hard.

If you love that, if you love the
struggle and that's part of why you do it, it also makes selling
a company a lot less appealing. Because if the idea is you're
doing it so you can relax, you wouldn't be building the company
in the first place.

Shontell: You've
grown tremendously since then. It seems like it was the right
choice. Jon Steinberg was with you for the first half of your
company. He left shortly after [you decided not to sell to
Disney]. How do you go from having someone who's an integral
player in keeping the company afloat, to keeping it going after
they leave?

Peretti: I'm
trying to think of the right way to answer this. It's hard in an
immediate sense. You have someone who's very active and doing
lots of things, and you need to figure out how you organize and
get things done. People often overestimate the value of
individual people. This happens with founders a lot.

People think that the key to
everything is the founder, and the founder is the one on the
cover of the magazine, the one who is the source of all the
success. The truth is, particularly once a company gets a little
bit bigger and there are more people involved with all different
experiences who come together, it really becomes a team thing.
You start to see that when there's a gap, a million other people
pick up the slack.

People step up. People who you
didn't think could do it step up and take on a role. People want
the company to succeed, and they want the company to thrive. When
somebody leaves and it's tough, you see a lot of people step up
and fill the void. It's really actually pretty inspiring that
there's a resiliency to a company and that the team is a real
thing. It can be hard, but I think also companies are systems and
they're people and they're operations and they're business models
and all those things are bigger than any one person. And they’re
even bigger than a founder or a senior executive.

The real story behind that lewd Ivanka Trump tweet, and
why BuzzFeed published the Trump-Russia dossier

Ivanka
TrumpSean Gallup/Getty
Images

Shontell: That's
great advice. I have a couple questions that are more about
recent times. One is, you all made some splashes during the
campaign and also post election. You know I have to ask you: what
was up with that Ivanka Trump tweet?

If you are listening and don't
know this story, I have to ask. You tweeted [just before the
presidential election] seemingly out of the blue about Ivanka
Trump. You tweeted, and I quote: “I met her once and she casually
said, "I've never seen a mulatto cock. But I'd like to!"

Surprised Ivanka would be shocked by lewd language. I met her once & she casually said: "I've never seen a mulatto cock, but I'd like to!" https://t.co/WrgCoM0MGK

What was the thought process
behind sending that tweet? Were you drunk? Were you okay? What
happened?

Peretti: You
know how if you meet a celebrity, you have a story of, "The time
I met this person ..." and you remember it? Not everyone's met a
celebrity, but a lot of people have this experience if you live
in New York or LA. The person came into the restaurant you're in
and they did something funny or whatever and you remember
it.

For me, what I remember about
Ivanka...We had a mutual friend. She came out for drinks. We were
doing sake bombs at a dive bar in Chinatown on the lower east
side. It was just a shock that she said that. It was like,
"What?"

I got off a flight and I was in
the Burbank airport, and I was reading Twitter. There was a
Buzzfeed news story that had quoted her saying she was shocked at
her father's language, something like that. I saw it and I was
like, "What? She's shocked? She uses that kind of language! How
could she be saying she's shocked by her dad's language like
she's some choir boy?”

Anyway, I saw that and then
without really thinking much — obviously because you wouldn't
tweet that if you were thinking a lot — I just retweeted that
tweet with a comment of, "Funny she's shocked by it because this
is what she said the one time I met her.

Shontell: I
remember Ben Smith, your head of news, saying, "Are there medics
on this flight?" You of all people should know to not tweet
before flying, but I guess you were off the plane.

Peretti: I was
getting off the plane. I did kind of get very quiet after that. I
didn't follow up with an additional explanation or tweets.

Shontell: Right.
If I remember correctly, Buzzfeed wrote an article interviewing
you about what your tweet was.

Peretti: Shani
calls me, and I can't not take the call when it's Shani calling
me — she's a very key, important and powerful person in our news
room. She calls me and is like, "I have a reporter here who wants
to talk to you." I was like, I never would've taken a call from
any other news sources but I have to when it's ...

Shontell: It's
your employee.

Peretti: I have
to answer the phone. Then I did some awkward interview about why
...

Shontell: Did
you talk to Ivanka after?

Jonah: I haven't
talked to her.

Shontell: One
other more serious thing that you all published was the
[Trump-Russia] dossier. This is the Donald Trump pee tape
origins, allegedly. You all find this document that's been
circulating around all of Washington. Obama's read it. Donald
Trump has apparently been briefed on it.

It's got a lot of different
allegations in it, and you publish. You say, "We haven't verified
everything in it. We tried. We spent weeks sitting on this thing,
but we feel like you, the public, deserve to see it because,
frankly, all of Washington already has."

It created this storm within
media of, “Should they have published it? Should they not have?”
We debated it in our news room. What was it like for you all, and
what was it like for you as a CEO of the company deciding to
publish this?

Peretti: I would
say in retrospect we feel like we made the right decision. When
you have a documents circulating in the highest level of the
government and people are taking action based on the document...
We have Harry Reid referencing it but not saying what's in it,
and you have CNN referencing it but not saying what's in it.
How's the public supposed to understand what's happening at the
highest level of government in something that's incredibly
important to the country and to democracy if they can't see the
thing that everyone in power is looking at?

We don't see ourselves as being a
news outlet that's trying to tell people how to think and tell
people what matters. We try to inform people, let people know
what's going on, be transparent with our readers, assume that our
readers are intelligent and can understand context that we
provide. It fit BuzzFeed New's values, to make the decision to
publish.

Building a company for the way the world works today, not
20 years ago

Getty Images/Michael
Kovac

Shontell: A few
wrap up questions. What is Buzzfeed, and what is its future? Are
you the next Disney? Are you the next NBC? What are you building
here?

Peretti: I think
every time there's been a massive shift in technology of media,
there's been a few companies that have emerged that are large
sustainable hundred year companies. When you look at ... There
was a period of tons of new people starting newspapers that
coincided with roads and be able to deliver newspapers, and a few
of them became really huge, enduring companies.

When you look at magazines, it
was really the postal service that enabled magazines. You could
deliver magazines to people's houses and also raise their
literacy. There were lots of magazines, and then consolidation,
and a few that became really, really big. The same thing happened
in the ‘80s with cable. You could actually talk to people who
experienced that. There were lots of cable channels that then
ended up becoming a few big companies.

I think with internet and media,
you're going to see something similar. We want to be one of the
ones to emerge from the era, redefining how news and
entertainment should work for the era of digital, the internet,
mobile and social. It feels like there's a possibility to build a
media company that's much more connected with people's lives,
that has a much more intimate relationship with readers, that
serves readers whether it's news or entertainment or things like
Tasty and lifestyle content.

I think we're also very well
positioned as a company with all the advances that are happening
in machine learning and deep learning and technology that's going
to really advance what's possible in media. We're building a
global news and entertainment company for the way the world works
today, instead of the way the world worked 20, 80 or 120 years
ago.

Shontell: Do you
ever regret raising so much money? There's an argument to be made
that ... I think TechCrunch sold for $30 million. Huffington Post
sold for $300 million. Arianna and Mike Harrington, the
co-founders, made about the same. One was much smaller, didn't
raise really much money, and one raised a ton. You've raised how
many millions? Hundreds of millions. Do you ever think, "I
should've just gone a little smaller."

Peretti: No, I
don't. I think it has to do with what you want to do and what you
want to build. My advice is there's not one path. There's not one
way to skin a cat. You see arguments online sometimes where
people are like, "You should raise a lot of money. You shouldn't
raise money. You should raise a little." It totally depends on
what you're doing and also what you're good at and what kind of
life you want to live.

If you are excited about building
something that grows really fast and has a lower chance of
success but could be giant, you should try to raise venture
capital and you should try to raise a lot of it as soon as you
have signal that you're onto something and that you can deploy
that capital to do something useful.

If you're someone who has a
special skill or wants to be an artist or wants to do something
that you can do with a small, core group of people, then you
shouldn't raise venture capital and you shouldn't feel badly if
you don't do the venture capital route. You should feel badly if
you're doing something that isn't the right fit for you and isn't
the thing that you're passionate about and doesn't fit your
strengths and the things you're interested in doing.

I know people who what they want
to do is think and write, and that's great. You can be really
successful, and there are multimillionaires who are writers. You
can be Malcolm Gladwell, who I think probably is richer than
Arianna Huffington or Michael Arrington. That doesn't mean that
you should not raise venture capital. You should just try to be
like Malcolm Gladwell. You should do what's right for you and
what fits your temperament and your passion.

Shontell:
Anything else to add for someone who wants to build an empire
like you're doing.

What to do if you want to build a business
empire

Peretti: If you
want to build an empire — I accidentally/reluctantly found my way
into building something that was much bigger than I expected. But
I think, start small and focus on the customer or the audience,
solving problems for them and focusing on that small thing. Then
figure out how to scale that into something much bigger.

Then if you are trying to build
somethingreallybig, then you just need to figure out how do
you find really great people that you trust who can join your
team and be part of it with you because, really, the key to
everything is you can't do it all on your own. You need to have
really great, smart people, people like Ze Frank and Ben Smith
with doing the product lab, and all these people who have a
unique perspective and are way better at their jobs than I am. I
would never be able to do what they do. That's what you
need.

I think that's the other thing.
If you want to build something really big, you have to be okay
with the fact that you're not going to be able to be in the weeds
on everything, and you shouldn't be micromanaging everything. You
need people who can do things way better than you can in the
areas where they have the ... What's the right way to end the
sentence? Sometimes I start sentences and ...

Shontell: We can
just let it trail off and just play some music?

Peretti: Just
end with, "Errr ..."

Shontell: That
sounds great.

Peretti: You
need to find people who are better at speaking than you
also.

Shontell:
Perfect. Thank you so much, Jonah. It's been a real
pleasure.